Star Trek: Lower Decks Season 5 Just Built An Entire Storyline Around A Classic Franchise Goof

In the first episode of the fifth and final season of "Star Trek: Lower Decks," called "Dos Cerritos," D'Vana Tendi (Noël Wells) is still living among her fellow Orion pirates, commanding her own vessel and regularly going on plundering excursions. Although Tendi is a capable fighter, she is mild-mannered at heart, trying to rein in the ultra-violent, murder-forward ethos of her crew. Not-so-secretly, Tendi longs to return to the U.S.S. Cerritos, where she can happily be a junior office; medical science, her friends, and gentle service interest her more than looting and violence. Luckily, Tendi's sister D'Erica has offered a deal; salvage a crashed 300-year-old Orion vessel from a distant planet, and Tendi will be allowed to leave Orion again to pursue her Starfleet dreams. 

A snag: when Tendi arrives at the location of the downed Orion vessel, there are others eager to salvage it for themselves. Tendi stands face-to-face with a blue-skinned species of ... other Orions. They wear lime-green uniforms and dark blue goggles, and their chests bear yellow M-shaped logos. They look quite silly. 

Deep-cut Trekkies, of course, will smile in recognition, as the blue-skinned Orions were how the species looked in their second canonical appearance on "Star Trek: The Animated Series" back in 1974. In the episode "The Pirates of Orion," the titular space rogues had looted a freighter and stolen the crucial medicine the U.S.S. Enterprise needed to cure an ailing Spock (Leonard Nimoy). The episode climaxed with Kirk (William Shatner) and the Orion captain (James Doohan) fighting on the surface of an asteroid. Amusingly, the blue-skinned Orions pronounced their own name with the stress on the first syllable. /OR-ee-ons/, as opposed to the now-common /oh-RYE-ons/. 

The appearance of blue-skinned Orions on "Lower Decks" finally explains why the species started out as blue-skinned pirates in silly green uniforms to the green-skinned aliens we see today. It seems that there are merely two races of Orions.

Orions had technically appeared prior to "The Pirates of Orion," as the green-skinned psychic variant of Vina (Susan Oliver) was famously seen cavorting half-naked in front of casual onlookers in "The Cage," the original "Star Trek" pilot. A fun story: initially, Majel Barrett stepped in to film Vina's scenes, and she was painted green according to Gene Roddenberry's script. The showrunner filmed Barrett dancing, but when the film came back from the development lab, she wasn't green at all. It seems that the lab didn't know she was supposed to be green, and "color-corrected" her scenes to make her skin the right color. 

"The Cage," shot in 1966, didn't air to the public until 1989. Footage from "The Cage" was repurposed for the two-part "Star Trek" episode "The Menagerie" (November 17 and 24, 1966), and audiences got the impression that Orions still operated in the slave trade; Vina is spoken of as property. The image of the green-skinned Vina appeared over the closing credits of "Star Trek" for many episodes. 

So why were the Orions re-colored for "The Animated Series"? There were rumors for many years about how the producer of "Animated," Hal Sutherland, was colorblind, which would explain why so many of the species and ships on the series were bright pink, purple, green, or other garish colors. At it so happens, the show's designer and colorist, Irv Kaplan, thought purple and green were good colors for a kid's show, and merely followed his creative muse. 

So it's possible the Orions were re-colored because Kaplan simply thought they looked better that way. The green uniforms certainly stand out against the primary-colored Starfleet uniforms typically seen on the show. As for the different pronunciation of "Orion," clearly the actors were directed to pronounce it that way, and no one was paying close attention to "Star Trek" canon. 

"The Pirates of Orion" was also the first time Orions had been established as pirates. That concept would continue throughout many bits of non-canonical, expanded-universe "Star Trek" lore for decades. Orions wouldn't appear in the franchise again until 2004, in the "Star Trek: Enterprise" episode "Borderland" (October 29, 2004). A large portion of that episode takes place in a small contested area of space between the Klingon Empire and Orion territory, and the crew of the Enterprise are kidnapped by an Orion vessel. Captain Archer (Scott Bakula) has to rescue his crew from the Orion slave camps, where they were to be sold as cheap labor or sexual servants. 

In "Borderland," though, the Orions were green again. Trekkies have come to accept "The Animated Series" as only semi-canonical, and many are able to hand-wave the error. 

The makers of "Lower Decks," of course, aren't going to let any continuity errors slide past them, however, and have now invented a canonical reason for the Orions' skin-change. It seems that the green Orions and the blue OR-ree-ons are different factions and races of the same species, and that they kind of hate one another. When the two factions spot each other in "Dos Cerritos," they immediately begin fighting, insulting each other over their skin color. 

Tendi, bless her, tries to protect her sworn enemies, and continues to insist on nonviolence. The design of the blue-skinned Orions is, more than anything, a cute wink to Trekkies who pay attention (AND WE ALL PAY ATTENTION), but now the franchise makes a tiny bit more sense. It only took 50 years.